Brand, spanking new education facility ready for students

An approximate $35 million dollar project to afford Oconee’s young the manual skills to use with brainpower to succeed as adults is now ready for students, in time for the start next week of a new school year.  A ribbon was cut this morning to officially open the Hamilton Career and Technology Center on s. highway 11.  And doing the honors was the retired educator, Fred Hamilton, now 92 years old.  Hamilton nodded in the affirmative when one of the ceremony speakers remarked that 52 years ago, when Hamilton served as county superintendent, he probably would never have imagined that what started as a vocational building would become a modern 21st century career and technology center. The HCTC is a sprawling building complex inside the county’s Information and Technology Center and, by design, is next door to the Oconee campus of Tri-County Technical College.  That’s a point stressed by Galen DeHay, Tech president, who predicted a partnership between his college and the county school district will pay dividends to high school graduates who can further their education at Tech and then work in Oconee County manufacturing facilities.  Two of those plants, Horton and Baxter Hi Tech, have facilities in the I&TP.